Real Estate Mitochondria

ANY FOOL CAN SELL A DOLLAR FOR SIXTY CENTS!

Today I received the following flyer in my letterbox and of course was very interested to know what the property had sold for. I searched online for the original advertisement and found it advertised at “Range $759,000 – $819,000”. This is a most ridiculous practice and if any Agent ever suggests it to you – tell them NO! If you, as a buyer, were confronted with an advertisement like this, where would your first offer lie? At $805,000? No, I didn’t think so. You would treat the lower figure as a price the Sellers MAY accept so you would pitch under that.

Of course that actually happened, with offers starting at around $705,000.00

Good Grief!

Fancy bragging that you sold it in record time. If, as an Agent, you have a desperate Vendor/Seller, it’s really easy to get them to accept a low offer, and that’s exactly what’s happened here.

The sellers bought this house in March 2008 for $830,000.00. Add stamp duty, a new kitchen and other light renovations and it owed them (without any interest payments if they’d borrowed to buy – I don’t know) at least $890,000.00.

It went under Contract for $740,000.00. Take off Agent’s commission, advertising, legal fees etc and you have a nasty and minimum loss of $175,000.00 over 4.5 years.

And I have abusive emails and people trying to tell me that the market is great, stable or growing (who ARE they kidding and what do they smoke?)

I’m not taking this as an isolated, severe example of what’s happening out there in the real world. There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples I could quote. Please see my previous posts. I’ll continue to post single and group examples.

If you own, get out and rent or be prepared to hang on for 15 years before you’ll get any “value” back. You heard it here first. I hope I’m wrong but I bet I’m right.